If I should learn, in some quite casual way
by O Mayari
Summary: Kate buys a house. McAndrews coda. The fluffiest thing I've ever written. Happy endings for Kate and Betty. Hell, happy endings for everybody. Seriously. For everybody.


Kate buys a house.

It seems so simple, put like that. Four words that don't account for the great and heavy weight of countless hours on the factory floor and still more spent singing in nightclubs, the pennies saved, the heart-rending clarity in that moment she decided she would, when Gladys had said, "A house. Betts was saving up for a house. Remember?"

And still, none of what leads up to the house galls. What galls is that the name she signs is Marion, a curious loopy ink-mark that looks strange to her.

"Why didn't I just change it?" she thinks, later on. It wouldn't have been hard, and she's had time. She's been waiting, really. Living, but also waiting. She could have used some of the wait to formally change her name.

But Vera says it's better this way. A couple people recognize Kate Andrews instantly these days. Kate Andrews is a smoky voice scratched out by the needle on the record player. She's a few rumors of a dissolved and long-ago newspaper engagement, a pretty face looking rapt onstage, an occasional tabloid figure in a form-fitting green dress; but beloved and proven to be a good woman, a nationalist nonetheless, thanks to her bombshell beginnings. Therefore someone you might want to know.

But Kate likes picking and choosing who gets to know her, who she lets in, how much she tells them. Always has.

Vera writes from fantastic places and seals her envelopes with x-x-o followed by the bright red lipstick imprint of her mouth. Vera Moretti. Kiss Kiss Hug. Marco's fireworks are back in business, but he hasn't much of a head for business, so it's a good thing he has Vera. They went to Venice in '52, and not one government official very much cared. They went to Sao Paolo. They went to Paris. They have threesomes, or so Vera's let slip a few times.

Once she'd let slip that the third is usually another man.

Marco makes not just fireworks, but also bunting and other accoutrements of Canadian patriotism. He's been photographed shaking Rollie Witham's hand. If this disturbs him, he doesn't let on like he used to. He's got silver in his black hair, creeping in early, and after his father came home Marco seemed to shed most of his anger. He'd explained to Kate that he can't keep it up. One Moretti needs to be sensible. One Moretti needs to be not-ruined.

He and Vera have a daughter with his dark hair and Vera's curving grin. He once told Kate that he doesn't want her making fireworks. He wants her at the country club.

"Mrs. Beaverton could arrange that, but I think our girl will make fireworks if and when she wants to," Vera had murmured. And when she'd relayed the country club story to Gladys, Gladys had laughed and laughed.

Gladys had slipped into the role VicMu's top worker with no difficulty at all, because that was what she'd wanted instead of country clubs. She'd also stood by Kate even when Kate had despised her, accused her of enjoying Betty's old position too much.

"I did enjoy it too much. Withams aren't cut out to be very good friends," she told Kate later on. A plain lie, given how much Gladys is willing to do for the people she loves, confided during one drunken early morning, eating breakfast or possibly a very late dinner in Kate's hotel room after a show. Gladys was wearing Capri pants at the time, Kate remembers. Newly introduced by Sonja de Lennart. Very modish in Europe. "But please," Gladys had implored, "Please don't tell my parents, because they don't know this is what the rich girls are supposed to be wearing right now, they think I'm doing it to annoy them, and I will never tire of shocking them."

Probably she never will.

When Pearl Jones from down the hall had joined a Communist movement hell bent on helping unjustly-accused blacks in the American South, Gladys had lent her new car and several thousand dollars to the cause. She'd also wanted to travel down with Pearl, to rescue the unjustly-accused, but then she'd reflected that she tended to bungle rescues.

"Rescues can be less about the people you were helping, and more about you," she explained to Kate.

So Gladys went instead to San Francisco, where she was photographed with movement organizers doing very boring things like pamphleting. She'd send Kate pictures of herself and all her new friends being bullied by police: 'Bob bravely standing up for our rights! Ellie refuses to be knocked down! Decca gives them what-for!' The House Un-American Activities Committee eventually sent her packing back to Canada, to Adele and Rollie's eternal while in San Francisco, she'd reconnected with an old American friend, an army officer she'd met once.

Kai Lo isn't exactly the American soldier Adele and Rollie had wanted. But that's all right, as long as Gladys stops threatening not to marry him.

"We take even the small victories and we cherish them. The war taught us that. So all I ask is that they not live like roadtripping American teenagers. Get a ring. Just a ring. I've _mailed_ them a ring," Rollie Witham once said to Kate at a party.

He'd acknowledged her, against all odds. The new up-and-coming songstress in the jewel-bright dress with its fantastic full skirt was somehow recognizable as the mouse who'd scurried around his daughter in her factory days. Or maybe it was that the mouse had never existed – that the girl at Gladys's back had been a shining, knife-sharp chanteuse all along.

"Look at you," his wife had told Kate admiringly, "Gladys has always had such well-turned out friends. First Carol shaking things up in London, and now you."

Carol Demers is married to someone wealthy and British, with a minor title, whose name means very little to Kate but probably very much to Carol. Carol's very small and beleaguered son is forced to dress up as some kind of page or child-in-waiting to the royals. Carol's dreams have come true.

Kate's haven't yet. Not really. A lot of her waiting time has been wasted, she thinks. At that party it had been wasted on Fred Norman, owner of the Condor Café and the Birdland Lounge, the man who'd eventually bought out and gutted the Jewel Box. He was – and is – far more polite and kind than this pedigree would suggest. But his tongue had felt strangely heavy and alien in her mouth, and she had no desire to let him in, to tell him anything, to know him.

She'd spotted a familiar, dark-eyed woman in New York once, sitting with friends in a park downtown, and had invited her for a drink on a whim, and had enjoyed without thinking about it the curl of her hair and the laughing touch here and there.

"I thought so," Teresa had said wistfully, three drinks later, "About you."

And Kate had swallowed back the oh-so-innocent disbelief she'd perfected (she'd recorded a duet with Tex Beneke around that time, a decently popular little song, in which she kicked things off with a gasp and an, "Oh, Tex, what are you _suggesting_?" It turned out that he was suggesting she come home to meet his mother. This was what sold well in the early fifties), and said, "Yes."

"Is it true? About Be—"

"Yes."

"If we do this, will it be about—"

"Yes," Kate had said.

So they hadn't done it. Instead she'd kissed a blue-eyed blonde later on, a girl who had no shared history with Kate or even with Marion, and no expectations. Just as well.

"Oh, it's the worst to use people for your own ends just to spit them back out," Gladys had told her once, after a fight with Kai, looking bleary-eyed but immaculate. She was dressed for air travel, prepared to fly down to San Francisco in flagrant violation of several injunctions in order to win back his love, "It's the worst, and I can't even say I'm not doing it this time because I've done it so many times. It's an excess of Withamry. It makes me feel like I have Mrs. Corbett about to chastise me in the back of my head."

Which made sense then, but by now is patently ridiculous. Lorna Corbett is a comforting voice these days, not a chastising one. She writes a weekly column for the paper. A journalistic friend got her the job after the war, and she adores it but claims it's only a small thing she does between caring for her grandchildren: Karen, Janet, Pamela, and Ajit. And she's well-respected for it. People say she has a mother's touch. Her recipes are divine – a touch of something Ned's mother suggested she add. Her responses to letters are thoughtful and heroically composed – a touch of that leadership she passed on to Sheila. Her take on family issues is sensitive and caring – a touch of what it takes to care for Eugene.

(Though really Bob handles most of that, does it well, understands what it means to be broken, and, above all, has faith that modern medicine can accomplish some healing.)

Once, Lorna had invited Kate to a charity benefit Drs. Ned and Sheila had organized for the new hospital children's wing. She was overjoyed when Kate agreed to sing, but then she told Kate she'd be overjoyed no matter what Kate decided to do.

"I'm proud of all my girls," she'd said primly, "Like I am of my children."

But she's proudest of Reggie, Kate knows, who'd worked her way from the factory floor to a scholarship, from that to a teaching position, and from that to a book of poetry that was selling well in the states, better in Canada, and fantastically in Europe. Last Kate heard, Reggie was down at Fisk University working with Arna Bontemps, whose writing, Lorna had explained to Kate, was apparently leagues better than that of the Bronte sisters.

As a rising literary star in her own right, Reggie would know.

"I should ask Reggie what she thinks of stardom," Kate tells Leon one day. Leon's come to see the house along with his children and his first grandchild, whose arrival had been a surprise to Kate when he'd sent her a telegram with the news.

Leon was married when she'd first met him, and Kate hadn't even known at the time, hadn't bothered to ask. She found out about his wife and kids later. Leon doesn't hold it against her.

His grandchild – Nancy – has a voice like an angel and big dreams, and when Kate goes to meet the Fred Normans of the world she takes Nancy with her, and shows her the recording equipment and the people in the band, and how to stay sharp and focused when everyone is looking at you in your green dress. And it's like she has a daughter, and she hopes Leon doesn't mind sharing. She thinks he doesn't mind.

"Now, wouldn't the first authority on stardom be you?" Leon says, because he likes to pretend Kate is bigger than she really is.

But Leon is a full-fledged pastor now, and he's found something better than stardom, which is really only a kind of cobbled-together dreaming after forbidden things, things denied in Kate's childhood. Leon's found that he can pour his factory earnings into his family and friends and community, and even into the most unexpected of strangers to darken his door, and so he lives the way Kate – very small – had always assumed prophets and chosen people and shining, sinless beings did, the way men of God were supposed to.

But then Leon looks around at the house, the curving stair, the couches Vera had pointed at in the department store and then sent Marco's cousins to pick up for them, the low table Gladys had had imported from China ("I didn't even ask Kai what it was actually for because I knew he wouldn't know, but I looked it up anyway so that his mother wouldn't think I'm a failure, but – surprise! – she still does and that's why I think my parents like her in spite of themselves!), the thick carpet gifted and installed by Stanley Corbett, Carpet King; the whole perfection of it, like something out of a magazine, and he says, "Or at least you, Kate Andrews, know the first thing about fearlessness, and going after what you want."

And that's something Kate can aspire to; that's truer and more honest than wanting to be a sinless being.

They go out to the garden, where the flowers were planted by Kate's mother and the high fences erected by Kate's brothers, at her direction, all of them looking to her like is isn't odd, and though she's earned most of the money in the family it _is_ odd – it's somehow dreamlike and wonderful to know they love her and look up to her and that's possible. It's possible to look up to Marion. It's possible for Marion's family to have someone worth looking up to.

They drink lemonade and talk until dark, and then it's time to go because tomorrow Nancy will be performing at her school, and Kate kisses her and feels sad that she can't regret not being able to promise she'll see it.

Tomorrow – tomorrow could be a whole new universe. There's a feeling creeping over Kate like the feeling she'd gotten when she'd first told Lorna Corbett her new name, when she'd watched her father hit the ground and crumple, when her mother had pressed a bundle of papers into her hands and told her to go.

But it isn't that feeling, not quite. That feeling had been a little afraid. And this feeling is different, weighted down by years of saving pennies and singing in nightclubs, wearing capris and drinking with best friends, savoring poetry adored in Europe, setting off fireworks for a crowd, smiling at photos of small boys squirming next to royalty, kissing Fred Normans and hating it and kissing blue-eyed girls after New York and not hating it at all, not to mention lifting the kisses from Vera's letters and preserving them in scrapbooks, and showering Nancy with praise and affection for her songs, denying Nancy nothing; and underlining Lorna Corbett's words on the page: _This last letter reminds me. To my readers who feel they are unloved, or unwanted, or freakish, or sick. You are not. You are not. I've known fearless people, heroic young soldiers and women who didn't flinch at cordite, and sometimes they were told they were wrong and unloved. But they weren't. You are not._

So this feeling is not fear. It's a heady fighter's feeling. It's what comes of the years stretching out after the war, the real battle years, the scrimping and working and loving times, in which she's been waiting. She's been waiting, but she's also been living.

And then the bell rings. Just once is all it takes. Kate's there, at the door, and the first thing she says (which is so _stupid_) is, "I should have gone to meet you."

"I told you not to," is the easy response.

That's true. That's true, because in the in-between years it wasn't like Kate didn't go to meet her, it wasn't like Kate didn't come even when she was expressly asked not to, it wasn't like Kate didn't write, and it wasn't like they didn't have this fight, over and over again. "I asked you not to wait for me," followed by "You should be living your life, Kate," followed by "It can't be right for you to come here all the time – you're getting famous!" followed by "I wouldn't have done this if I'd thought it would have tied you to me like this. I wouldn't have done this if I'd thought you'd want to worry about me all the time."

"It's never been about what I want," Kate had hotly retorted, "Because I didn't want this. You did this on your own!"

"It was the right thing to do for you, Kate," had been the response.

And Kate hadn't visited again for nearly a year, that time, had only written letter after letter, full of love and yet hiding secret vitriol, because that was how angry those words made her. That was how horrible it was to have someone doing things for you, deciding things for you, thinking they could chart the course of your life, could tell you who to be and not to wait.

She'd seen Ivan Buchinsky once, in a wedding announcement, of course, next to a pretty girl captioned Donna Gleeson. Kate had made, without really thinking about it, a kind of pitying face for the poor, pretty Donna. Then Gladys had grabbed the paper and shown it Vera, who'd started laughing, and a visiting Reggie had peered over their shoulders and quoted, apropos of nothing, "If I should learn, in some quite casual way, that you were gone, not to return again— read from the back-page of a paper, say, held by a neighbor in a subway train, I should but watch the station lights rush by with a more careful interest on my face, or raise my eyes and read with greater care where to store furs and how to treat the hair."

This had seemed appropriate for Ivan: a dismissal. A fragmented, truncated thing, one small half of a poem, not even the whole, for someone Kate really hadn't loved very much, and who yet she suspected, deep down, had not really done much to earn her not-love, either.

Kate's glad she never really let Ivan in, never bothered to know him, never told him very much. Ivan didn't deserve it.

"The actual sonnet," Reggie had confided, knowingly, some time later, "Is about not being able to express great grief for someone. It's about how some feelings are too precious for a mundane moment, about how you have to hide them within yourself, about how you have to wait."

And this seems appropriate, too. But not for Ivan.

"I didn't go meet you," Kate says now, very deliberately, "I respected your wishes."

"You did," comes very casually, very easily. They are still on the stoop. People could be watching. This is a mundane moment. And they are playing a noble game of waiting. Kate's been playing it for years now. And here – here is the person who Kate thinks might have invented it.

"You've never respected mine," Kate says.

The suitcase falls. So does that jawline Kate wants to kiss. Her guest's mouth hangs open.

"Never _respected—_Kate_!_"

"You loved me," Kate says, very casually, like she's reading some line in the paper, so that no one will realize she's said something very precious, "But this was never what I wanted. You know that, right? I never wanted that for you."

Kate's guest flushes and scrambles to pick up her suitcase. She says, with that stubborn annoyance that means she's been bested somehow, but she doesn't have to like it, "Are you going to let me in, or not?"

Kate lets her in.

And later Lorna will come down the drive, followed by Stanley and Bob and Eugene bearing food, followed by Sheila holding Ajit and explaining to the three little Corbett girls and Stanley's wife the marvels of the human bloodstream. The Morettis will come in the shining coral car Vera's just learned to drive. Reggie will telegram her latest poem: _Hello to the girl who once punched me in the face_. Leon will return with Nancy and his wife; and Gladys, Pearl, and Kai will arrive last, with seven or eight bottles of Rollie Witham's best wine between them.

But by then Kate will have kissed the jawline, and she will have said, "See this house? It's for you."

And when the response is a stubborn, "Kate, I didn't _ask_ for—" Kate will say, "I didn't ask for you to go to prison. You just did. You did and I lived, but while I did it I waited for you. Noble, isn't it?"

"Noble!" Betty will screech, because Betty's always liked to have the monopoly on nobility, "It's stupid, Kate. That's what it is!"

And Kate will smile and kiss away her annoyance and say, "Yes. It's stupid, the precious things we do for those people we let into our lives. So let's stop waiting. I love you. Let's just live, from now on."

* * *

Credit for title and sonnet snippet to Edna St. Vincent Millay.


End file.
